NETFUTURE
Technology and Human Responsibility
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Issue #130 A Publication of The Nature Institute April 2, 2002
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Editor: Stephen L. Talbott (stevet@oreilly.com)
On the Web: http://www.netfuture.org/
You may redistribute this newsletter for noncommercial purposes.
Can we take responsibility for technology, or must we sleepwalk
in submission to its inevitabilities? NetFuture is a voice for
responsibility. It depends on the generosity of those who support its
goals. To make a contribution: http://www.netfuture.org/support.html.
CONTENTS:
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What Are Technology's Gifts? (Kevin Kelly and Steve Talbott)
... and its risks
DEPARTMENTS
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About this newsletter
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WHAT ARE TECHNOLOGY'S GIFTS?
Kevin Kelly and Steve Talbott (kk@kk.org; stevet@oreilly.com)
Following is a continuation of the dialog begun in NF #126
(http://www.netfuture.org/2001/Dec1801_126.html#2b). Kevin Kelly was the
editor and publisher of *Whole Earth Catalog*, founding editor of *Wired
Magazine*, and author of *Out of Control* and *New Rules for the New
Economy*. His website is http://www.kk.org. Steve Talbott is editor of
this newsletter.
* * * * * * * * *
STEVE TALBOTT (to Kevin Kelly): You asked me to "unleash my respect for
technology", and went on to point out that I emphasize the price of
technology's gifts much more than the gifts themselves.
You're probably right about the emphasis. But the key point here is that
I don't want to assign value (good or bad in any primary sense) to what we
usually think of as "objective devices". Moral value is always a feature
of volitional consciousness, not of inert things:
The nineteenth century thought that machinery was a moral force and
would make men better. How could the steam-engine make men better?
(Wendell Berry, *Life is a Miracle*, p. 74)
Value always has to be assessed in terms of *what someone is doing*.
That's why, in the formulation I offered, the hope associated with
technology is really vested in our stance toward technology:
Technology is our hope if we can accept it as an enemy; as our friend,
it will destroy us.
The negative emphasis you refer to results from the fact that our culture
tends to regard technology as an objective presence that is good in
itself. This stance, by turning attention away from the real source of
good and evil in men and women -- that is, by displacing our moral
responsibility onto machines -- guarantees that the machines will work
destructively upon us. In such a context the negative emphasis is
required by the facts themselves.
But this emphasis should, I think, always be accompanied by a calling of
people back to themselves, where the hope of technology *can* be realized
-- realized in the very act of our overcoming the machine's invitation
toward moral passivity. This overcoming itself, which leads to a fuller
development of our higher capacities, is technology's gift, if we will
only avail ourselves of it. Insofar as I do not always stress this hope,
your criticism may be justified.
But I am curious: What do *you* see as the hope or gift of technology?
* * * * * * * * *
KEVIN KELLY: The word technology suggests steam locomotives, iron works,
telephones, computers, chemicals, silicon chips and a swelling mass of
cold stuff. The emphasis is on stuff. While the term has its root in the
Greek techne -- of art, of artifice -- the word really came to mean
something concrete during the industrial revolution when human
capabilities to invent and manufacture stuff quickly transformed our
surroundings. Hard gray metal filled our once stone/wood/fiber-made
world. While we recall the industrial revolution as a material
revolution, the great change it brought was really due to a new ability to
wield energy on command, in either small amounts on cue, or in large,
unfathomable bursts on demand. The stuff that held, transmitted, and
displayed this energy loomed large as technology. And because of its
almost magical power, this stuff was alien, scary. Since then, this stuff
has been the bogeyman we love and hate.
As we refined these inventions, they lost some of their mass. We began to
see them less as stuff, and more as actions. Today technology suggests
software, genetic engineering, virtual realities, bandwidth, surveillance
agents, and artificial intelligence. You wouldn't hurt your toe if you
dropped any of this. Technology became a force. A verb not a noun. A
vital something that throws us forward, or pushes against us, and against
the biological world which we perceive is our natural mode. It is now a
super alien power, the thing to blame when things go wrong.
In reality technology is both stuff and force and more. Technology is, in
fact, anything we create. Writing, painting, music are all technologies.
Libraries are technologies, as are double-entry bookkeeping, civil law,
calendars and clocks, institutions, all of science, as well as the plow,
clothes, sanitation systems, medical tests, personal names, and the safety
pin. What isn't technology then? Nothing that doesn't come from our
minds.
That is probably going too far for many people. How can a Shakespeare
sonnet, or a Bach fugue be cast in the same mold as a nuclear bomb or a
Walkman? Easy. If a thousand lines of letters is a technology (the code
for an HTML page), then a thousand lines of letters in English (Hamlet)
must be as well. We can't separate out the technology in the Lord of the
Rings movie. The literary rendering of the original novel is as
technological in the strict sense as the digital rendering of its
fantastical creatures and places. Both are works of the human
imagination. Both affect audiences powerfully.
Technology is a type of thinking. A technology is a thought expressed.
One could view the elaborate system of law running Western societies as a
variety of software. It's a complex set of code that runs on paper
instead of in a computer, which slowly calculates fairness and order
(ideally). Both law and software code are manifestations of human thought
and thus both are technologies. When Wendell Berry asks: "How could the
steam-engine make men better?" the answer is "compared to what?" Are
there any manifestations of human thought that can make men better?
There probably are. While a Star-Wars' laser and Ghandi's act of civil
disobedience are both works of human imagination, and thus both
technological, there is a difference between the two. Not all thoughts
are equal. Some thoughts are better thoughts. More importantly some
thoughts by themselves are silly, or misguided, but as part of something
larger make sense, or are even needed to get to a better thought.
Thoughts have different values, in context.
I believe the same is true of technology.
An answer which Wendell Berry might agree with for his own question is
that the technology of law makes men better. A system of laws keeps men
responsible, urges them to fairness, restrains undesirable impulses,
breeds trust, and so on. Yet, there are good laws and bad ones, and some
systems of law (technologies of law) are better than others. The proper
response to a bad law is not no law; it's a better law. The proper
response to a bad idea is not to stop thinking; it's a better idea. The
proper response to a bad technology is not to stop technology; it's better
technology.
The logical next question is, how do we improve (create) a method for
evaluating the worth of specific technologies? How will technology help
us to be better people? Indeed, how do we make better technology? If by
technology we mean what Wendell suggests -- steam-engines, chemicals, and
hardware -- then I'm not sure this question will get us far because it is
not big enough. By my calculation the total summation of technology
tidily equals civilization. Civilization is technology. It's a
collective and accumulative work of human imagination and invention. So
Wendell's question becomes, "How can civilization/technology help to make
people better?" Or, to put it in Steve Talbott's terms, "What is the gift
that technology delivers?"
Every thought can be subverted. Every technology can be abused. With
every solution a technology brings, it also brings new problems. The more
powerful the thought and technology, the more disruptive. If that is what
technology brings -- an even wash of good and bad -- then the gift is a
meager one. What technology ultimately offers, though, is far greater.
It offers possibilities and choices. And this is why we gravitate to it
so.
In general, a technology presents humans another way of thinking about
something, another view of life, another choice, an alternative state of
being. Each additional media invented offers the world another way to
express our hearts and souls. As more possible ways to express the human
condition are devised it enlarges the pool of people who can find their
unique place. Imagine if Charlie Chaplin was born 500 years ago, before
the age of film, or Mozart 2,000 years ago before a piano and orchestra.
What a loss to the world! The possibilities opened up by the invention of
piano technology opened up Mozart and Beethoven. The invention of cheap
oil-paint technology opened up Van Gogh. How many geniuses at the level
of Beethoven and Van Gogh will die soon without ever having encountered
the technological possibilities that they would have excelled in?
We value diversity for its own good. Diversity -- possible species,
possible races, possible view points -- is an end in itself that we crave.
It is what we want (among other things) for our children -- to have
choices. More than anything else, this is what technology brings:
choices. More than anything else, it is technology (the human imagination
made real) which creates choices.
Without a doubt there are some possibilities which constrain previous
choices, and there are some possibilities which seem to promise more
opportunities but don't. While new technologies in general don't
eliminate old ones, occasionally a particular technology will diminish
previous choices. Sometimes, too, a technology will not yield as many
options as it promised. This is the challenge of technology, to select
these out.
The gifts of technology are possibilities, opportunities, diversity of
ideas. Without technology we have very little of those. Our collective
job is to replace technologies that constrain real choice, with those that
open it up. The telephone, for instance, is a technology that continually
widens opportunities and possibilities, while closing off very little.
DDT is a technology that unlocks some important possibilities but
restricts too many others. Genetic engineering opens up vast terrains of
choices, but its potential to constrict many others is both vast and
uncertain.
How can technology make a person better? Only in this way: by providing
them with chances. A chance to excel at the unique mixture of talents
they were born with, a chance to encounter new ideas and new minds, a
chance to be different than their parents, a chance to create something
their own.
I will be the first to add that by themselves -- without anything around
them -- these possibilities are insufficient for human happiness, let
alone betterment. Choice works best when it has values to guide it. But
if one has spiritual values, do you even need technology to be happy? Or
in other words, is technology necessary at all for human betterment? The
same question: Is civilization necessary? I say yes. A special subset of
humans will find that the constrained set of choices found in, say, a
monastery cell, the tiny opportunities in a hermit's cave, or in the
deliberately restricted choices of a wandering guru are the path to
betterment. But most humans most times in history see the accumulating
pile of possibilities in a rich civilization as something that makes them
better people. That's why we make civilization/technology. Choices
without values yield little, but values without choices are equally dry.
The gift of technology is possibility -- possibilities in ever increasing
mountains of diversity. Like biological life itself (despite its many
horrors), and diversity itself, I find greater possibility to be an
unequivocal good.
* * * * * * * * *
ST: "Technology is anything we create". "Civilization is technology".
"Technology creates choices". But if "technology" can be almost anything,
then the term means almost nothing, and our conversation won't illuminate
much in particular.
Is the field of human creativity really coextensive with technology?
Personally, I think we are closer to making them into opposites.
Creativity is required for technological innovation, but its role is
largely ignored and the entire point of the innovation is generally to
reduce the creative and expressive to the syntactic and automatic. The
classic contrast between artisan and factory worker does, after all, have
some validity -- and I'm convinced that we are allowing digital
technologies to alienate us even further from the artistic and creative.
But instead of running off in that direction, I'd like to respond more
positively by offering this definition of technology:
Technology consists of the machinery expressing and further reinforcing
our abstract habits of mind.
(We can usefully let "machinery" here include such things as
organizational apparatus and bookkeeping and alphabetizing procedures.)
The definition aligns well with common usage that refers, for example, to
digital, genetic, and nuclear "technologies". But it also identifies a
pronounced trend of the past several centuries -- the trend that has made
these technologies possible. It's the trend you fingered in your little
essay on "The Computational Metaphor" (NF #126), where you talked about
how we've been converting the world of "its" into an abstract world of
"bits". Information, genes, and atoms are all high abstractions behind
which we lose sight of the world except as a field for blind manipulation.
But the definition applies also, for example, to technologies of physical
transportation. Automobile and airplane do, as you say, widen our world
of choices in some respects. We can get to many more places much more
quickly than ever before. But this freedom tends to "abstract" us from
the world or, conversely, to render the world an abstract network of
transportation nodes that we're merely passing through at ever higher
velocities. The choice to get to know one place deeply and intimately
becomes much more difficult for most people.
To free up some choices is always to put others further from reach. What
conceals this from us is our infatuation with particular kinds of choice.
In sum: I think we need to recognize the one-sided human activity that
comes to expression in the distinctive technological thrust of our day.
Then we can counter this one-sidedness by intensifying our inner ability
to relate to our surroundings in a non-abstract way -- concretely,
qualitatively, expressively, meaningfully. As I indicated before, these
strengthened capacities through which we "resist" technology are
themselves the gift technology offers us -- but only if we don't mistake
the gadgetry itself for the gift.
* * * * * * * * *
KK: Technology can't be ANY anything, just anything the mind creates. I
read your definition of technology as that which is abstract, or that
which makes things more abstract. If by abstract you mean "of the mind"
then there is little difference in our definitions, and I think what I
said about technology would still hold true with this definition. For
instance, in this sense, your definition (Technology consists of the
machinery expressing and further reinforcing our abstract habits of mind)
is really parallel to one I could write: Technology is an apparatus which
expresses an idea or thought of the mind. Would you agree with that?
However if you mean something else by "abstract" you'll have to explain it
to me, since I then don't see the connection to technology. Webster's
wasn't much help. It suggests: "the word poem is concrete, poetry is
abstract." How a car is abstract, while a poem is not, is not evident to
me.
* * * * * * * * *
ST: It is common today to equate the abstract with the mental or
conceptual. But abstraction represents only one pole of our mental
activity, and our off-balance inclination toward this single pole is the
whole problem.
To abstract is, literally, "to draw out from", to remove something --
usually something narrowly and sharply defined -- from its fuller-bodied
context. Mathematical and logical formulations are abstractions. We can
abstract the dimensions, mass, velocity, and other quantities from a
thing, but the thing is no longer to be found in the numbers. Likewise,
we can abstract the empty logical (or grammatical) structure from a
conversation, but the logical structure is not the conversation. To grasp
(or reconstitute) the content from *which we do the abstracting* requires
the other pole of our mental functioning. This other pole has to do with
qualities and meaning. If we want a real world, we need the qualities of
things. Without its qualities, the world is not there.
In contemplating (or reasoning scientifically about) a soprano's sung
note, I can deal in wavelengths, or else I can cultivate an objective
awareness of the tone itself -- its texture and timbre and expressive
gesture -- as it sounds in and shapes my consciousness. In the former
case, I approach the note abstractly (and this abstract approach will
figure prominently in my design of sound-processing machines); in the
latter case, I approach it qualitatively.
As you say, an automobile is not an abstraction. But a map is highly
abstract relative to the geography it represents, and the automobile has
tended to convert our surroundings into not much more than a map so far as
our awareness of them, our engagement with them, is concerned. There are
many other ways the automobile expresses our habits of abstraction. To
take just one line of thought:
Cut a cross-section from a tree trunk and you have a wheel. It still
bears something of the tree's unique character, and, of course, this
uniqueness is now its imperfection. The technological imperative drives
us to remove the imperfection as far as possible. Flawless circularity is
the goal, and this in turn sets requirements on roadways, which begin to
smoothen and straighten themselves out before our ever more efficient
advance. Local details with their own character -- this creek and that
ridge -- are no longer allowed to interrupt us. They give way to the
abstract, geometric purity of the lines and nodes constituting a
transportation network. Our travel, now so efficient (look at the
speedometer!), is deprived of context and qualitative detail.
Abstraction, by itself, detaches us from the world.
You profess to see no essential difference between the alphabetical
encoding of Hamlet and the encoding of an HTML page. Fine. But your
ability to conceive and work with the idea of texts as mere strings of
characters is exactly what separates our day from Shakespeare's. It is,
after all, a long way from the creation or contemplation of Hamlet, as a
meaningful expression, to the information-theory abstraction that
reconceives it as an indifferent string of bits without reference to their
meaning.
*This* is the shift in mental focus I have in view when I speak of
technology as expressing our abstract habits of mind. And my worry is
that we are so enthralled by the undoubted technical powers we have
received through abstraction (for example the power to construct computer
networks) that we are less and less able to entertain the meanings we
began with. Just as the soprano's tone is no longer in the mathematically
conceived wave, so also Hamlet's meaning is no longer in the bits.
Neither is it available to a mind that has assumed a "bit stance".
Bit-mindedness is not inconsistent with meaning-mindedness, but once we
grow accustomed to the intellectual ease of manipulating bits and other
abstractions, it can be extremely difficult to rouse ourselves to reckon
with the qualitative and meaningful. This is illustrated by the insanity
in our employment of various economic concepts, such as Gross Domestic
Product (GDP).
GDP is increased when people have heart attacks requiring expensive
medical attention, or when we bulldoze wetlands, or when, as a few decades
ago, we funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into high-rise urban-
renewal housing projects that became perhaps the most miserable and
socially destructive "communities" ever erected with good intentions --
and GDP rose again when we began tearing the high rises down. Everyone
*knows* this, and yet the public discussion goes on as if GDP numbers
really were a measure of economic health.
Abstractions such as GDP have a seemingly unshakable hold upon us, and the
hold is indistinguishable from the fact that we can't help thinking of
corporations and economies as machines. The nice thing about mechanisms
expressing abstractions (such as corporations that choose, computer-like,
to do little more than calculate their own bottom line) is that their
operation gets as close to automatic as possible. We can mentally coast
along with them. (This has to do with the moral passivity I mentioned
earlier.)
When, on the other hand, we begin to ask questions such as "What social
values do we want our products to embody?", things become much less neat.
We have to wrestle with ambiguity, meaning, value. It's much easier to
stick with the automatic, clear-cut, precise, and unproblematic terms of
abstraction -- which can also be taken as the defining terms of
technology.
So: you and I are, of course, free to define "technology" as we wish.
But if we use your definition, then I want to say that I have no problem
with some "technologies" -- for example, Hamlet. My problem is with those
creations that represent the powerfully one-sided influence of our
dominant abstracting tendencies -- the creations arising from the kind of
stance that says, "Its are bits". This is a stance that loses us the
world. As Max Frisch remarked, technology is the knack of so arranging
the world that we don't have to experience it.
If we want a real world to experience, we need qualities -- we need to
find our way from bits back to its. My worry is not about technology as
such, but rather our willingness to accept its invitation to enter a
bitworld without retaining an adequate, counterbalancing foothold in the
world of qualities. We are crazy *not* to retain this foothold, since the
bitworld is in any case always parasitic upon the qualitative presences
from which it has been abstracted.
* * * * * * * * *
KK: There is the old saw about a chicken just being the egg's way to make
another egg. The reason we find any humor in that classic is because it's
true to a large extant. Richard Dawkins extended that insight in his
theory of the selfish gene. His notion was that a chicken is just the
gene's way of making more genes. By his perspective everything is
explained by genes. In other words he looked at the world from the point
of view of genes. At one level it is true that organisms simply exist to
replicate genes, but at many other levels it ain't so. Living organisms
have many other "qualities" (as you might say) that have nothing to do
with the logic of genes.
Most of the people I know, including Dawkins, are perfectly capable of
looking at a chicken in a number of ways. They can see it as a glorious
domesticated jungle fowl, or as someone's favorite pet, or an egg machine,
or as an amazing social animal, or as sack of flesh carrying genes. Their
view shifts according to their interest or need.
But the amazing thing about Dawkins' view -- which might be called the
bit-stance in biology -- is that it is an extremely productive view. When
you put on the selfish gene rose-colored glasses, you see the world anew.
Looking at the universe in the way a gene might view it uncovers aspects
about biology and evolution you would have never discovered any other way.
It is totally crazy, as you say, to have only the view that biology is
nothing but replicating bits, except, sometimes, when it is totally
brilliant.
As we both agree, the bit-stance is in ascendence throughout our culture.
When new and productive stances come along we go overboard in exploring
them. We are like kids with a new periscope; we use it to look at
everything, and through it everything looks new. Over time we'll see that
a lot of what we saw via the bit-stance was simply amusing and not
important, or that it was distorted, or that it was a distraction. But
some other discoveries with this new metaphor and perspective will be
valuable and unique. We won't know which is which until later -- that's
what exploring means.
If the bit-stance was the ONLY view available all the time, I would be
worried like you. But while it is critical to fully immerse oneself into
the view at the moment of looking (or else the view doesn't work), I find
that people have multiple stances. They can look at their kids and see
machines that metabolize starch, or they see a beautiful son or daughter,
and somewhat at the same time.
Let's take us for examples. You understand scientific logic, precise
abstractions, the dynamics of bits, and yet you can see the world in its
values and meaningfulness. I too can see that a chicken is nothing but
tissue holding selfish genes, but I also see it as the trickster being who
snuck out of the heavenly zodiac to boast in the morning dawn. We don't
have much trouble zipping back and forth.
I think what worries you is a belief that this new stance, this
perspective which features abstractions, which is powered by technological
advances, is the lazy way. It is a bad habit, something we will become
addicted to, unless we shape up. Therefore we need to heroically struggle
against it (like Odysseus!) to find meaning. Each new technology is yet
another temptation pulling us off the straight and narrow path to meaning.
The proper life in this modern world is to resist the easy passive path,
where we see chickens as genes, the countryside as maps, and the brain as
a computer. Odysseus was a man untroubled by these temptations. Danny
Hillis, on the other hand, was mired in the bit-stance.
I think it's almost the other way around. Odysseus, I believe, could
only see the world as full of meaning, as a play of values, as
ambiguities. On the other hand, Danny Hillis (who is us) can both see the
word in ambiguity AND in precise, bit-laced, abstract glory. We hold
these views and others in our minds with ease. I think we benefit greatly
from the view that technology has brought us. We gain because it is a
productive new view, and because we have it in addition to all the other
views of the past.
I agree with you that if we gave up all other views of the world for
technology's view, we'd be in sorry shape. But I disagree with you that
this view is inferior, parasitic, corrupting, or narcotic. The bit-stance
is another view, another choice, another good.
You use it and you're wonderful.
* * * * * * * * *
ST: Remember, I'm not saying that the technological (abstracting)
function of our minds is inferior and corrupting, but only that it is
unhealthy when given one-sided rein -- when, that is, we ignore the world
of quality and meaning from which we do the abstracting.
You've offered the perfect illustration. Those who promote the selfish-
gene business have lost (at least from their theorizing) all qualitative
appreciation for the organism, and therefore their theorizing is just
plain wrongheaded, not to mention dangerous. There is *no* level at which
the understanding of genes as selfish is "totally brilliant". The gene no
more wields the chicken in order to make more genes than the liver wields
the chicken to make more livers. The erroneous thought here clearly
derives from machine thinking: the parts of a machine can indeed be
arranged in this clear-cut, controller-"controllee" relationship, but the
parts of an organism cannot.
The fact is that our DNA is not a kind of computer program calculating our
traits. There's an irreducible wholeness to the cell and organism so
that, in the words of my Nature Institute colleague, Craig Holdrege, "the
organism determines its genes far more than genes determine the organism".
This is now becoming much more widely recognized.
So it's not that we can combine the selfish-gene view with other views to
arrive at a healthy balance. Taken seriously, the selfish-gene view
denies the integral, qualitative, and governing unity of the organism.
That's the way it is with the bit-stance when one-sidedly pursued: it
leaves so much of the whole out of its abstractions that it quickly leads
to "understandings" that are highly illusory.
The reigning notion of the gene arises from an illicit concretization of
mathematics. In the classic genetic experiment you cross, for example, a
white-flowered pea with a violet-flowered pea, resulting in a first hybrid
generation with all violet flowers. If you allow these in turn to self-
pollinate, the second generation will have (approximately) 75 percent
violet flowers and 25 percent white.
But you can obtain these neat, statistical relations only by restricting
your attention to a relatively few ("Mendelian") traits and, even in these
special cases, by dismissing the observed, qualitative differences between
occurrences of the "same" trait. (Not all violet flowers are exactly the
*same* violet color. Ignoring this allows you to obtain your simple
statistical relations.)
Once these appealing mathematical relations were abstracted away from the
complex, full-fleshed reality of the organism, it became all too natural
to hypothesize a few simple and general mechanisms to account for the
numbers. In essence, the abstract and highly selective numbers were
reified -- that is, projected back onto the organism from which they were
derived, but now in the hopelessly simplistic form of perfect little
algorithmic mechanisms of the sort that can so easily be correlated with
unambiguous mathematical results. (The history here is laid out in
Holdrege's book, *Genetics and the Manipulation of Life*.)
Thus was born the prevailing notion of genes and chromosomes -- the notion
that more recently shows every sign of falling apart. It's a good example
of how a technological mindset tends to falsify our understanding of the
world.
* * * * * * * * *
KK: Your argument above is not an argument against the selfish-gene
alone, but against the abstraction of reductionism. Science reduces
complex "irreducible" processes to simplified mathematical equations or
notions in order to understand them. In a very profound sense,
reductionism is the core of science -- reducing complex phenomenon to a
few variables at a time, which can be observed and tested. Scientists
themselves would be the first to acknowledge that the reduced version does
not capture the full essence of the whole and may at times even
misrepresent it. But it is a tool, a wonderful and brilliant tool. It
allows us to grasp and use the complexity of reality. All that science
has brought -- antibiotics, airplanes, inexpensive color dyes, just to
start a list, and yes, all the bad stuff too -- have all come about
because of our skill at reducing things to abstract simplifications.
If you would like to dismiss reductionism in any form, and to throw out
all that it has generated for us, this conversation won't be large enough;
we'll have to start over, because reducing things to abstractions is the
normal tack for almost every intellectual stance I know of, except one:
the mystical stance. The mystic, almost by definition, embraces the
whole, with all its paradoxes and contradictions and cross-logics.
I have absolutely no argument with the mystic view. In fact I encourage
it. The view of the whole is glorious, compassionate, and vital. A
mystic would say the reductionist view is partial and limiting -- which it
is. But these partials views are valid. They are useful, which is why we
continue to use them even though the mystical view is so satisfying.
Does the mystical view get closer to the "reality" of reality? I don't
think so. I believe that a view of life that does not include the
mystical whole view is not very real, but any view of life that does not
also contain the reductionist view is as likewise unreal -- a bit of
poetry -- and misses much of what reality has to offer.
I may be in the minority, but in my eyes a true mystic would be able to
see the world from the selfish gene point of view and find a hen
controlled by numerated chromosomes as marvelous as seeing the chicken as
an earthly gift. Both the myopic scientist who claims to witness only
mathematical genes, and the robust mystic who sees only the whole
organism, both are blind to the full beauty of reality.
* * * * * * * * *
ST: Hey, Kevin, we really are having difficulty connecting! Maybe this
will help:
First, I have no interest in mysticism. I want a proper and scientific
understanding.
Second, I am not objecting to the practice of isolating one or two
variables while holding other things constant. Nor in general am I
objecting to limited views of things. (All views are limited.) But I
*am* saying that much of contemporary science, having lost sight of the
limitations of its technological mindset, has therefore been led into
dangerous error.
Third, and more specifically, my objection to the "genes cause traits"
theory was not merely that it is reductionist but that it is mostly false.
Either genes cause traits or they don't, and the answer is that they
don't. Nearly every biologist nowadays will, when pressed, *tell* you
they don't. But the way of thinking *as if* they did has been so deep-
rooted that it continues to govern not only the public's thinking but also
that of many scientists. No scientist, reductionist or otherwise, should
want falsehood.
Today I saw a news report about the first cloned cat. The "original" was
a black, orange, and white calico; the "copy" turned out to be a black and
white tabby. The report (in *Newsweek*) duly notes the puzzlement of
scientists, adding by way of partial explanation that
coat-color patterns aren't controlled solely by DNA. Neither is an
animal's personality, meaning that an affectionate cat could give rise
to an aloof feline.
So much for cloning your pet. If the author had gone on to try to tell us
what traits *are* "controlled solely by DNA", he might have stumbled into
a real public service. But I guess that's still too much to ask.
Certainly genes are among the conditions bound up with traits. But when
you start exploring all the relevant conditions, you find that the
performance of the genes is as likely to be the "result" of the other
conditions as to be their "cause". And you find that your search for
conditions inevitably leads you to the organism as a whole.
Fourth, nothing prevents us from developing an ever more complete picture
of these complex relationships and of the organism as a whole. There's
nothing at all mystical about this, and abstract, reductionist
simplification may possibly play a transient role. But, crucially, we
must continually bring reality to bear upon the simplification as a
corrective, rather than allowing the simplification to "correct" (that is,
falsify) reality. Unfortunately, abstract simplifications running amok
are dominant in much of science today.
Finally, there's one point at which your and my thinking seems to
converge. You write that scientific reduction
allows us to grasp and use the complexity of reality. All that science
has brought -- antibiotics, airplanes, inexpensive color dyes ... and
yes, all the bad stuff too -- have all come about because of our skill
at reducing things to abstract simplifications.
That's what it usually comes down to, isn't it? Science works! It
produces endless wonders. I myself am in continual awe of them. We
*need* to produce things that work. The only oddity is that we should by
degrees have come to equate our inventive ability with an adequate
understanding of the world.
Science gives us things that work because that is the one thing its method
insists on. It is a method *for* making things that work. The
understanding it sponsors is the understanding implicit in making;
everything else drops out of the picture. This lowering of the aim of
science is why the line between scientist and commercial entrepreneur is
breaking down. It is also why the old distinctions between pure and
applied science, and between scientist and engineer, are losing their
force. (How many scientists today bridle at the "genetic engineer"
label?) Philosopher Daniel Dennett argues approvingly that biology as a
whole "is not just like engineering; it is engineering. It is the study
of functional mechanisms, their design, construction, and operation".
But most scientists continue to believe they hold the keys, not merely to
endless construction of clever things and successful IPOs, but to an
understanding of the world. Their confidence, combined with failure to
recognize the limitations in their method, yields a systematic blindness.
So perhaps we can agree on this: the technological mind substitutes
making for understanding. In other words, it strives for blind power.
* * * * * * * * *
KK: You bring up the case of causality in genes. Do genes cause traits?
Causality is a contentious word. There are entire philosophical libraries
on the subject. Can we say that anything causes anything? In a strict
sense no, since causality in most cases is not a chain, or a ladder with a
prime elemental cause, but a field, a web of interacting and at times
self-causing factors. It is absolutely clear that genes alone are not
responsible for an organism's shape, form, behavior or being. It is also
absolutely clear that without genes, or with different genes, all these
things are altered to varying extent. The entire debate is to what
extent.
I can only repeat that the stance of viewing the organism as being caused
by genes only, while obviously limited and "wrong," is a useful device of
reductionism and a way of investigating the extent to which organisms ARE
shaped by genes. Sure, we all want to have a more wholistic view of an
organism. One way to get there is to see how far (or short) genes will
take you, and move on from what that teaches us.
Another path is to say genes don't really matter much and ignore them;
that way is ignorant and won't get to holism.
But I'd like to address your main concern, which is your worry that
science has become engineering, and that we have soiled our souls because
we insist on investigating the world by making things -- things that are
often more powerful than us (whether it be gas engines or artificial
minds).
As usual, while you worry, I celebrate. I think that this urge to address
the world by creating things is a holy stance (we are made in the model of
a creator who creates), and that we have divine work to do to explore
creation by making new things and new tools. I'd like to close this round
of our conversation by pointing to something I wrote 4 years ago, a piece
commissioned by Science magazine for their 100th anniversary.
The essay, "The Third Culture"
(http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/279/5353/992) is a rough draft
of the new way of thinking which technology has created. The main gist is
that while humanists and artists explore our creation by expression,
scientists explore it by observation and experiment, while nerds explore
creation by re-making it. For example, to explore reality, artists will
examine their own and other experiences of reality and write, paint, dance
about it; scientists will probe reality and subject it to experiments;
technologists, on the other hand, will try to make virtual and synthetic
realities. They seek truth by making new tools. While you will probably
be horrified by this stance, I believe that this style of thinking will
invigorate us as humans, and bring us closer to our souls.
==========================================================================
ANNOUNCEMENTS AND RESOURCES
New York conference: Education and Technological Consciousness
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A public conference at Columbia University's Teachers College in Manhattan
will feature addresses by NetFuture columnist, Langdon Winner, along with
Joan Gussow and Andrew Kimbrell. Winner teaches at Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute and is author of two classics of technology assessment:
*Autonomous Technology* and *The Whale and the Reactor*. Gussow, a
professor emeritus of nutrition and education at Teachers College, has
authored *This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader*, among
other books. Kimbrell is director of the International Center for
Technology Assessment in Washington, D.C, and author of *The Human Body
Shop: The Cloning, Engineering, and Marketing of Life*. All three will
speak on aspects of the theme, "Education and Technological Consciousness"
during this two-day conference, to be held May 3 - 4. Regular and
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The conference is sponsored by the Center for the Study of the Spiritual
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innovation at Teachers College.
For more information, please contact: The Center for Educational Outreach
and Innovation, Teachers College: 212-678-3987; www.tc.columbia.edu/ceoi.
==========================================================================
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